5 cups of sugar…

Today after the kids finished school they wanted to make cupcakes. This is nothing new. They always want to bake. I am a little behind in school due to sickness and an extreme case of procrastination, so I told them yes. If they were quiet. I left them to their business and retired to my room to read. 

First of all, they were not quiet. As soon as my bedroom door shut they were blasting the new Taylor Swift song “…Ready for it” and not long after I could hear them bickering through the walls. 😫

This continues for awhile and then, one at a time, they come in my room to tell me the same story, three times. The just of it was this… 

Elly had a recipe for frosting and they began to make it, without realizing it was also a cookie recipe, and they had put all the ingredients for the cookies, AND the frosting, in the bowl. Also, 3/4 cups of sugar was misread as 3 cups of sugar. What resulted was a really granule-y (is that a word?) fluffy-ish mixture. They made me come out and look, and then I instructed them to just throw it away. Figuring, incorrectly, that they now would just make the frosting portion and be ok. This is the frosting that resulted from that assumption. 

Before showing me this really putrid-looking frosting, they frosted their just-out-of-the-oven cake with it. I didn’t get a picture of that. But it looked like the vomit I cleaned up yesterday. 

Here is the cake in the trash. 

This frosting was made with granulated sugar. 2 cups. If you are keeping count this is now 5 cups of sugar in the trash. 

I found them a normal recipe for buttercream frosting. Explained that they needed powdered sugar. And that there was a difference between “softened” and “melted” butter. Abigail and Ollie disappeared, and only Elly was left standing. This is a 13 year old that asked her 9 year old sister the other day how to make Ramen noodles… I helped her get the butter right and together we mixed up the ingredients. She then colored (🤢) it and frosted her cupcakes. Which they had been smart enough to not cover with the other batch of frosting. 

Perfection

While I didn’t get much reading done, I did hear a lot of debates in the kitchen about adding fractions. So I might be 5 cups of sugar poorer than I was this morning, but the kids learned some valuable lessons. And if you’ve ever met me, you would know that it isn’t easy for me not to take over in the kitchen. I’m type-A to the hilt. But I’ve been trying to make it a habit to let them help more and learn. What’s 5 cups of sugar in the scheme of things? 

My friend over at  Happy Healing always asks questions at the end of her blog, so I thought I’d try it out and see what you guys think.

Do you have any kitchen nightmare stories with your children? 

What are some ways you teach your kids that don’t include books?